"2018.06.03 duet with Caleb Gamble —Pittsburgh, PA — in person": Starting on January 1st, 2018, I began making a movie every day of me playing (M)Usic.  The plan was to shoot one every day of 2018 & to string together excerpts from each of them in chronological order to make a feature-length movie to be called "365".  Along the way I decided to compile monthly reports named by month & year, e.g.: "January, 2018", & to release these online a month after they were done.  Hence, "January, 2018" was uploaded on March 1, 2018.  I started thinking about each month more & more thematically.  "May, 2018" became my piano month.  "June, 2018" is my duets month.  It was difficult to find 30 local people willing to play a duet with me to meet my goal of a different duet for every day in June so I contacted people in my international contacts to somehow make a duet together — using Skype or some other means.  We've been playing the duets for as long as they take, spontaneously deciding when they were over, & then I've been excerpting roughly :20 to a minute to use in "June, 2018" & "365".  At 1st, each movie that I made documenting each duet was thought of as little more than raw footage but, gradually, they started seeming like significant works in & of themselves.  SO, today, after I'd edited the footage I shot with Michael Pestal via FaceTime, I decided to declare each movie to stand on its own & to break my pattern of waiting a month to post the monthly footage to post one of these daily duets every other day starting today, June 16th, until mid-August when all of them would be uploaded.  This 3rd one has Caleb Gamble playing alto horn & me playing vibraphone.  Caleb is one of the motivating forces behand many things of interest to me in Pittsburgh, including the May Day Marching Band.  My vibraphone, having been modified by the person I bought it from, leaves much to be desired in terms of how well the keys can be unmuted & how loud the motor is for spinning the butterfly valves.  I chose to play sparsely & even ventured into the same key as the alto horn: F major.  I was pleasantly surprised by the alto horn's 'warm' tone  I often explain to people that I'm not a musician, that I'm a Usician, a Low Classicist, a booed usician, a Sound Thinker, etc.  People often seem to agree that I'm not a musician because they hate the way I play so much & hate the way I break all sorts of unwritten laws about what makes 'good music'.  In other words, they don't understand that I'm trying to make a point that I'm thinking about context & creatively exploring it.  - tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE note written on June 18, 2018E.V. 

Tags:  

plus-circle Add Review

comment

Reviews